Nietzsche for Finnegans Wake

The standpoint of “value” is the standpoint of conditions of preservation and enhancement for complex forms of relative life-duration within the flux of becoming. There are no durable ultimate units, no atoms, no monads: here, too, “beings” are only introduced by us (from perspective grounds of practicality and utility). “Forms of domination”; the sphere of that which is dominated continually growing or periodically increasing and decreasing according to the favorability or unfavorability of circumstances (nourishment) . “Value” is essentially the standpoint for the increase or decrease of these dominating centers (“multiplicities” in any case; but “units” are nowhere present in the nature of becoming). Linguistic means of expression are useless for expressing “becoming”; it accords with our inevitable need to preserve our-selves to posit a crude world of stability, of “things,”. We may venture to speak of atoms and monads in a relative sense; and it is certain that the smallest world is the most durable- There is no will: there are treaty drafts of will that are constantly increasing or losing their power. (Friedrich Nietzsche: The Will to Power. 715 Nov. 1887-March 1888).

How valueless the word “reality” is and yet syncronically how valuable in view of this obvious opposition that allows multiplicitous correspondences between that which is thought real and that which is unreal, fictional, illusory. The same is the case with the words “becoming” and “being”

Nietzsche had undone the sovereign self by criticising causality and substance. He had indicated our ignorance of the minute particles involved in a “single” human action. Freud undoes the sovereign self by meditating upon those minute particulars. (Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak. Preface to Of Grammatology. p.xl) But this is not followed through

Finnegans Wake according to Marshal McLuhan, Jacques Derrida, and indeed some of the best minds of the later 20th Century has spoken directly to the effect of the strong technologies that are still to come about in our world but that none will overpower the complexities of language.

Something that carries within itself the trace of a perennial alterity: the structure of the psyche, the structure of the sign. To this structure Derrida gives the name “writing”. The sign cannot be taken as a homogenous unit bridging an origian (referent) and an end (meaning), as “semiology”, the study of signs, would have it. The sign must be studied “under erasure”, always already inhabited by the trace of another sign which never appears as such. “Semiology” must give place to “grammatology”. As I have suggested, this move relates closely to Nietzsche’s “geneological” study of morals as unending “sign-chains”. (Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak. Preface to Of Grammatology. p.xxxix)

The value of time spent on the Large Glass and Finnegans Wake and the time spent on choosing the Urinal as a work of art. Values are operated upon

The cloture of metaphysics found the origin and end of its study in presence. The questioners of that enclosure – among them Nietzsche, Freud, Heidegger – moved toward an articulation of the need for the stratefy of “sous rature”. Nietzsche puts “knowing” under erasure; Freud “the phsyche” and Heidegger, explicily, “being”. As I have argued, the name of this gesture effacing the presence of a thing and yet keeping it legibl, in Derrida’s lexicon, is “writing”, – the gesture that both frees us from and gaurds us within, the metaphycical enclosure. ((Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak. Preface to Of Grammatology. p.xli)

The experience of “freedom” felt in any reading of Finnegans Wake is derived from the updraft of being deprived of a language of specific meanings, metaphysics or grammar and further underlying assumptions. Language itself is here placed on the block in the sure and certain belief that how language appears to function in all other works and in our everyday coalition with it is mindfully challenged as the most complex and difficult problem in the sciences that requires attention – since in our failure to even begin such a project lies our exasperation and our delight in the world into which we were born.

Freud-Nietzsche for the furtherance of this topic.

Bisexualism appears in Joyce’s and Duchamp’s works perhaps as form of neutering in Duchamp’s case – Bisexualism in Tragic Drama and the Classics.